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Wanna help your team by sneaking through enemy territory to provide spawns? THIS IS NOT TEAMWORK FGT I HOPE YOU RUN OUT OF MOTION BALLS TOO EARLY TO BE SUCCESSFUL
Wanna be Javelin squad but only have two guys? BETTER NOT GET YOUR SOFLAM KILLED FGT THIS IS NOT TEAMWORK WITHOUT A SUPPORT DUDE DROPPING AMMO ON YOU EVERY 2 MINUTES

The story is something I never expected to get but is probably one of my favourite things about the whole damn game! It's deep, intriguing, well-constructed, and covers quite a lot of different themes which I love. Plus they're doing a damn good job of telling it too; giving players little snippets here and there which are all seemingly obviously connected by invisible strands to something significantly larger and, potentially, darker, plus they drip feed it so that players who aren't interested can flat-out ignore it and players who are interested aren't just given a mountain of exposition in one big gulp so that they lose interest. Great pacing that I honestly don't think I've ever seen in a game before

The only criticisms I have towards the game are towards its lore and writing, funny enough. Whenever I watch any of the game's cinematics or listen to any of the characters speak, I often think about how comparably shallow the characters and narrative are compared to other games with an overarching story. While each character has a decent backstory and a consistent portrayal, I don't find them to be as intriguing as other nuanced and flawed video game characters. An appropriate comparison would be between OW's 22 heroes and the 9 mercenaries of TF2; the mercs have considerably greater depth in character compared to their Blizzard counterparts. The Spy is a chain-smoking assassin lady-killer who acts domineering and exasperated;

Spoiler

yet he is secretly proud of his son, the Scout, for growing up independently without his care.

The Soldier and the Demoman were once good buddies until their superior instigated a war between them based on conjecture, blackmail and deceit. Tracer of OW is exclusively positive almost all of the time, with the most that she has ever suffered in terms of trauma or despair is a failed assassination prevention on a social leader and her greatest flaw perhaps being her unabashed idealism. That isn't to say that the characters of Overwatch are poorly written; it is that comparable games that I have seen tend to be superior to it with their narratives and actors.

I'll be grateful of any good online resources people know of (good youtubers, guides, stats, whatever). Been checking out r/overwatch and r/Competitiveoverwatch so far.

Just don't rely on Your Overwatch as a primary source; their information is quite basic and many of their assumptions about the meta have proven to be incorrect.

Meanwhile, turn to almost any of the big name professional players and their streams for competitive help, like Seagull, AimbotCalvin, Kephrii, Taimou, Harbleu, etc. Many are actually former competitive TF2 players!

I also recommend Ster's twitch channel; he's also a former TF2 content creator that is now serving as one of the representatives for OW's upcoming World Cup!

character isn't everything, while overwatch might lack in depth of character for the characters, it makes up with character design(aesthetical), expressivity(they way they interact and the emotions of their animations*), plot, lore and backstories(again not for depth, as much as for creativty and how they're all connected to each other), and to be honest, we're playing a videogame here, they did the best they could do, you don't get depth of character in a multiplayer game, this ain't dark souls or metal gear, i think they actually did a better job than team fortress the guys at blizzard, at least with the theme they were going for...

*:i mean, if even i get that, surely more normal people must fall in love with OWs characters by expressivity left and right.

Yeah, that's essentially my opinion about the matter anyway. Overwatch plays so well that I can forgive most hiccups that the game has in terms of narrative. And besides, the characters are already solid enough for players of different personalities to fall in love with.

The thought of Assaults running out of ACE 23 rounds mid firefight, Engineers facing the rear of an unaware MBT with no rockets left, Recons unable to...Whatever the fuck they do. These are the things that keep me up at night